The word 'critical" has three meanings which are dangerous, important, and disapproving. The purpose of this blog is to examine important or over-looked cultural, political, artistic, or historical issues of our time. Also, this blog is intended to be educational.

Friday, May 5, 2017

Depicting Depression

A twenty-two year old photographer has documented
his daily battle with his "inner demons" in a haunting and
thought-provoking series of his own photographs.

Christian
Hopkins was diagnosed with depression while he was in high school. The Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, resident began taking photographs as a means of ‘fighting’ his
illness. He
credits his images, and the photo-sharing website Flickr, where he found his
original inspiration, with saving his life,

A photographer has captured
what it feels like to live inside a black cloud of depression in a stunning and
haunting series of photographs.

Hopkins, 22, lives in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. He explains that the images of decapitated
heads, shrouded figures and bleeding ghosts, which he originally shared on
his Facebook page, sum up what depression
feels like to him, The Huffington Post reports.

He said that he discovered
photography at age 16 after being diagnosed with depression, and credits the
art therapy with saving his life, noting that he was never able to explain in
words how his depression felt, but through his images, he found a means of
describing the effect that the mental illness has on him.

"Throughout
my life, I’ve had these demons that I’m battling against, just really negative
thoughts that I couldn’t control," he said. "Whenever I had to
describe it, I had nothing to say, but I had images, I had ways to express
myself through pictures, to fight against my depression."

Christian added that he
first became interested in photography after his mother gave him a camera for a
high school trip."I started looking for small stories that I could tell.
Eventually I was looking for the hidden beauty in the world," he said.

"A few months later I
woke up one morning and nothing was satisfying, nothing meant anything, it was
all a black void. Everything seemed so pointless, I just wanted it to end. To
put it simply, I tried to kill myself. There was no reason for it, no
explanation."

"I have been using
photography as a means of therapy to help deal with a lot of the emotions that
I had trouble understanding at the time," he explained to the Huffington
Post.

'Whenever I felt controlled
by a particular emotion, I wouldn't be able to think or concentrate properly
until I took that emotion out of my head and trapped it in a photograph.'

After a bout of depression
and subsequent suicide attempts, Christian discovered Flickr his senior year of
high school. At first, he began copying the style or other photographers he
found through the picture-sharing website, before eventually finding his own
surreal style.

"[Photography] became
a form of therapy that I could use to fight my depression," he added to The
Weekly Flickr. "I would create an emotion that I was feeling so
that I could see it. Once it was on the page, it was no longer in my head and
that was incredibly relieving."

Christian says his favorite
image that he has taken is one entitled Inner Demons, because it "so
accurately" depicts what he is feeling, and he believes that anyone
looking at the photograph can immediately understand the conflicted emotions
that he is trying to convey, without ever having felt that way themselves.